


The Eagle of Death

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Kushiel's Legacy - Jacqueline Carey
Genre: Betrayal, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, POV First Person, Regret, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 15:38:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5791093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I am the Scion of Camael. But, too, I am an adept of Kushiel. From his greatest Scion, I learned that ’tis not only swords and daggers that defend kingdoms or bring them down.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Eagle of Death

My bloodline was forged in the crucible of Camlach. It is a narrow land, stark and towering, where the blood of the One True God’s deadliest Companion has over the centuries admixed with that of Skaldia’s fiercest warriors. Our most prized flower is no delicate rose or lily but one that blossoms in ice and snow and yields up a liquor that burns like frostbite. My House might more properly be called an aerie: that of _les aigles de mort_ , the Eagles of Death.

I am the Scion of Camael. But, too, I am an adept of Kushiel.

Not the sort that first comes to mind when a d’Angeline hears that phrase; no Night-Blooming Flower raised or seeking apprenticeship in Mandrake or Valerian House. In my estimation, the so-named “sharper pleasures” are the predilections of cosseted lordlings who were not first beaten for trivial misdeeds at six years of age, with yet another stroke of the lash for every tear they shed. Lordlings who were not ordered, from the same tender age, to make camp amongst the stones of the Camaeline Range on even the bitterest nights, that if we did not become impervious to the cold we could at least learn to bear it without complaint. Lordlings who, at the same tender age or not far from it, did not see their first Skaldi gutted like a pig in battle, or questioned for intelligence with implements that, in most of Terre d’Ange, are associated only with the “sharper pleasures.”

It is a piece of irony, how our countrymen dismiss us: “Camaelines think with their swords.” This, from those who have chosen to interpret Elua’s “Love as thou wilt” not as a simple proscription against violent mockery of the sacred bonds forged by the body — a proscription we do honor in Camlach — but as a license to debauchery, enshrined in worship. Outside of Camlach, d’Angelines think with their swords of flesh.

There are exceptions. Most are common men, but not all. The Three Princes, of a certainty (and, if my father had the right of it, thinking too much with his sword and too little with his mind was the death of Rolande). Somerville’s son. The Duc de Namarre, the Comte de Fourcay. Admiral Rousse, though perhaps he comes of it by his Serenissiman blood. The Whoremaster of Spies, I am forced to admit.

And then there there are the Great Players. Some of them ride into battle on destriers, or march to it with swords across their backs and daggers on their hips, but some do not. They command battlefields all the same. They read the tapestries of history and politics as Camaeline captains and commanders read battle plans, they study the warp and the weft in their entireties, and from all this they learn to predict the pattern on the loom — and to weave it to their profit.

The Greatest of Players is no man. She is my elder foster-sister, Melisande Shahrizai. The Scion of Kushiel.

The heirs of Camael have never much esteemed those of Kushiel, nor do we think overmuch of its founding Companion. We respect the gifts of the other provinces: Eisande for its healing arts, L’Agnace and Namarre for their husbandry, Siovale for its inventiveness, even far-too-proud Azzalle for its sea-mastery. We salute the landless Cassiline Brothers, who are no soldiers but who surpass even us in the arts of defense. But what bring the Kushelines to the table of Terre d’Ange, other than a taste for blood drawn without valor? Without skill honed by years of sparring and self-denial? And if one must atone for one’s sins, why not take up sword to defend the defenseless, or hoe to feed the hungry, or needle to clothe the naked? ’Tis easier, is it not, to take twenty lashes and a pail of salt-water over one’s welts than to devote one’s life to mending what one has torn?

I fostered three years in Kusheth and, in truth, am still not much impressed by its people. But, again, there are exceptions. The foremost, far and away, is my elder foster-sister — subtler at fifteen than spies and courtiers thrice her age, subtler than even Delaunay, and cold as the Camaeline Range into the bargain. From her I learned that ’tis not only swords and daggers that defend kingdoms or bring them down.

I learned, too, that those who seek either goal do best to cultivate a blithe indifference to the fate of most folk. And to not merely cultivate, but refine, a taste for cruelty.

I can imagine the rumors yet to be born, that I fell thrall to Melisande’s beauty when I fostered in House Shahrizai. Arrant nonsense, and with the added offense of its implied comparison to that fatuous idiot Baudoin de Trevalion. Though I know not how he was not hampered in the endeavor by his mother’s uncut leading-strings, I will say that Baudoin acquitted himself well enough in battle. Pity that was the only virtue of his uncles and cousins he shared.

If these are cold words from a man he once called friend, so be it. Melisande never ensnared me, but I will not deny that she, no less than my father’s flail and his arms-master’s fists and the icy stones of the Camaelines, helped make me what I am.

Tonight I pledged myself to her destruction, though it would not surprise me were she to escape the justice she has so richly earned. I do not blame her for my failings. I am man-grown; I accept that I am a liar, a murderer, and a traitor to my country. And I accept what it has cost me. I would fain dwell on that than on what it has cost my lover, whom I will never see again. Or my son, whom I will never meet.

Another piece of irony: were it not for the woman I have just sworn to destroy, never would I have met the woman I love. The latter is no paragon of cold beauty who requires suffering to make her blood run hot. She is a daughter of Anael, hands rough and chapped from bringing green things out of the earth. Her mouth tastes not of apples but of pears. I am a cruel man but I will say in truth that never, not once, was I so to Anne; in her presence alone did I feel this past year I yet have a heart. Though I bid for Ysandre’s hand, I had never truly thought that gambit would succeed. I expected, instead, to take Anne to wife one day, and not for love alone. Camlach needs in its women not purity of bloodline nor rarity of beauty but health and strength, common sense and courage.

I know it is a son she bears me. Little more than a season after she lit the candle, she told me, she knew she was with child. She sought the counsel of Lombelon’s herb-wife, who tends to most infirmities there and attends its women in childbed. Through some woman-craft I neither know nor asked the details of, she can divine the sex of babes while they are yet in the womb.

The morning after Anne and I lay together for what we knew could be the last time — and it was — I kissed her on her brow, pressed a purse of coins into her hand, and brushed a tear from her eye with my thumb. I lay my other hand gently on her belly, which has only just begun to swell, and told her, “If I do not come back to you alive, name him for my father. Maslin.”

It is the only thing I will have ever given him. I can bequeath him naught, not even the arrow-rent shirt they will tear off my bloody back before they lay what’s left of me in state as the hero I am not. All I own is forfeit to the Crown.

I am glad I promised Anne none of it. To her, at least, I will have broken not one promise.

One irony more: what I can salvage of the legacy I will leave, I owe to Delaunay’s anguissette. A whore who ensorcelled a Cassiline; a dagger of steel in a sheath of silk; a learnèd woman who could have been yet another Great Player had she not a heart, or that eerie mote in her eye. I hold no illusions that she offered me a hero’s death out of any regard for me. I have well earned the hatred of most of my countrymen, and none more than her and her Cassiline.

And she was right: in my three years with Melisande, I should have learned how the Punisher of God marks his weapons. I should, too, have contemplated one of Melisande’s favorite aphorisms. It is the moral of an old Hellene tale about an oak and a willow, one upon which those beloved of Kushiel cast new light: _That which yields is not always weak._

I am an adept of Kushiel. But I am no penitent of his, to believe my sins can be lashed from my back and then washed away with a pail of salt-water. In the morning I shall offer up my life to mend what I have torn, and I make no pretense that it was my choice all along. The wings I hear beating for me are not of bronze. They are the pinions of the Eagle of Death, who comes for me with talons outstretched, waiting only for me to wield the Sword of Camael one last time.


End file.
